Wild in the Streets: Difference between revisions

1968 film by Barry Shear

Wild in the Streets is a 1968 American dystopian comedy-drama film directed by Barry Shear and starring Christopher Jones, Hal Holbrook, and Shelley Winters. Based on the short story “The Day It All Happened, Baby!” by Robert Thom, it was distributed by American International Pictures. The film, described as both “ludicrous” and “cautionary”, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Film Editing and became a cult classic of the 1960s counterculture.

Popular rock singer and aspiring revolutionary Max Frost (Christopher Jones) was born Max Jacob Flatow Jr. His first public act of violence was blowing up his family’s new car. Frost’s band, the Troopers, live together with him, their women, and others, in a sprawling Beverly Hills mansion. The band includes his 15-year-old genius attorney Billy Cage (Kevin Coughlin) on lead guitar, ex-child actor and girlfriend Sally LeRoy (Diane Varsi) on keyboards, hook-handed Abraham Salteen (Larry Bishop) on bass guitar and trumpet, and anthropologist Stanley X (Richard Pryor) on drums. Max’s band performs a song noting that 52% of the population is 25 or younger, making young people the majority in the country.

When Max is asked to sing at a televised political rally by Kennedyesque Senate candidate Johnny Fergus (Hal Holbrook), who is running on a platform to lower the voting age from 21 to 18, he and the Troopers appear – but Max stuns everyone by calling instead for the voting age to become 14, then finishes the show with an improvised song, “Fourteen or Fight!”, and a call for a demonstration. Max’s fans – and other young people, by the thousands – stir to action, and within 24 hours protests have begun in cities around the United States. Fergus’s advisors want him to denounce Max, but instead he agrees to support the demonstrations, and change his campaign – if Max and his group will compromise, accept a voting age of 15 instead, abide by the law, and appeal to the demonstrators to go home peaceably. Max agrees, and the two appear together on television – and in person the next day, using the less offensive mantra “Fifteen and Ready”.

Most states agree to lower the voting age within days, in the wake of the demonstrations, and Max Frost and the Troopers campaign for Johnny Fergus until the election, which he wins by a landslide. Taking his place in the Senate, Fergus wishes Frost and his people would now just go away, but instead they get involved with Washington politics. When a Congressman from Sally LeRoy’s home district dies suddenly, the band enters her in the special election that follows, and Sally – the eldest of the group, and the only one of majority age to run for office – is voted into Congress by the new teen bloc.

The first bill Sally introduces is a constitutional amendment to lower the age requirements for national political office to 14, and “Fourteen or Fight!” enters a new phase. A joint session of Congress is called, and the Troopers – now joined by Fergus’s son, Jimmy (Michael Margotta) – swing the vote their way by spiking the Washington, D.C., water supply with LSD, and providing all the Senators and Representatives with teenaged escorts.

As teens either take over or threaten the reins of government, the “Old Guard” (those over 40) turn to Max to run for president, and assert his (their) control over the changing tide. Max again agrees, running as a Republican to his chagrin, but once in office, he turns the tide on his older supporters. Thirty becomes a mandatory retirement age, while those over 35 are rounded up, sent to “re-education camps”, and permanently dosed on LSD. Fergus unsuccessfully attempts to dissuade Max by contacting his estranged parents (Bert Freed and Shelley Winters), then tries to assassinate him. Failing at this, he flees Washington, D.C., with his remaining family, but they are soon rounded up.

With youth now in control of the United States, politically as well as economically, similar revolutions break out in all the world’s major countries. Max withdraws the military from around the world (turning them instead into de facto “age police”), puts computers and prodigies in charge of the gross national product, ships surplus grain for free to Third World nations, disbands the FBI and Secret Service, and becomes the leader of “the most truly hedonistic society the world has ever known”.

Ultimately however, Max and his cohorts may face future intergenerational warfare from an unexpected source: pre-teen children. When a young girl finds out Max’s age (which is now 24), she sneers, “That’s old!” Later, after Max kills a crawdad that was a pet to several young kids, then mocks their youth and powerlessness, one of the kids resolves, “We’re gonna put everybody over 10 out of business.”

Production notes[edit]

The film was completed in 20 days.^[1]

Lowering the voting age was a genuine issue in 1968 and was not passed until 1970 with Oregon v. Mitchell lowering the…